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This invention is related to electronic product description transfer between a trading partner that designs a product and a trading partner that manufactures the product and more particularly to the organization and use of a catalog of component information used in the generation of process documents and programs to adapt an assembly process to assemble the product as specified in the electronic product description.
In the present invention, a consolidated component catalog provides the information for a component used in the assembly of a product in two sections: an assembly process independent section and an assembly process dependent section. The assembly process independent information is used to correct and validate the product description information. The assembly process dependent information is used to generate the programs and documents to adapt an assembly process to assemble the product described in the product description. A component is identified using a part number from a part number system in the product description and the consolidated component catalog. Another product description using the same component may identify the component with a second part number from a second part number system. The consolidated component catalog relates the first part number and second part number to the component so that redundant component information is not created.
Products Assembled from Components
In the electronics industry, many companies, called Original Equipment Manufactures or OEM, design and develop products that are manufactured by assembling components using an assembly process. Electronic printed circuit cards are an example of products assembled from components where components such as resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, microprocessors, memory, and connectors are soldered to a printed circuit substrate to assemble the printed circuit card. Each component must be placed onto the printed circuit substrate with high precision and a typical printed circuit card may contain several hundred to several thousand components. The assembly process may use automated equipment to place components and other automated equipment to test that the printed circuit card was assembled correctly. Some of the automated equipment is designed to assemble a specific product. However, most of the automated equipment are programmable and may be adapted to assemble most printed circuit cards. Companies like Fuji, Panasonic, Universal, and others provide a wide variety of equipment that performs the component placement steps to assemble a printed circuit card. Each type of equipment has characteristics that make it ideal for particular modes of use. For example, some component placement equipment is designed for high volume production but takes time to change from one product to another. Other component placement equipment is designed for rapid change from one product to another but has a placement rate much lower than the high volume machine. Hewlett Packard, Gen Rad and others provide a wide variety of equipment to test that the correct components were placed and that the electronic circuits function. There are a large number of assembly and test equipment suppliers and the variety of equipment is large. Assembly and test equipment are grouped together to form an assembly process where the combined capabilities of the equipment perform the steps to assemble and test the product. The equipment can be adapted to assemble a product based on a description of the product. Products assembled from components are not limited to electronic printed circuit cards. Products fabricated from sheet metal are assembled using equipment adapted to produce the metal components that are then assembled to produce the product. Petrol-chemical products may be produced using chemical process lines with equipment that are programmed to produce specific products.
To adapt an assembly process to assemble a specific electronic printed circuit card product, each piece of assembly equipment must be programmed to position the printed circuit substrate and to place each component or to test each circuit to validate correct assembly. Some of the assembly operations may include manual process steps that require detailed assembly drawings and instructions for the assembly operators. In the past, the generation of programs for the equipment and documents for the assembly process was done manually. In the past 10 years, companies like FabMaster and Unicam (both are now part of Tecnomatix-Unicam) developed and market software that take the Computer Aided Design file or CAD file that describes the printed circuit substrate and the position of each component, and the Bill of Material file or BoM file that describes the quantity and specific components of an electronic printed circuit card and from these files, a program generates the programs and documents to assemble the electronic card from the set of components. These programs are usually called Computer Aided Manufacturing programs or CAM programs. For a CAM program, the CAD and BoM files provide a complete description of a product. In addition, the CAM programs require information about each component such as precise component shape and dimensions, input and output pin assignments, carrier type, rotation position on the carrier, etc. as well as key characteristics of each automatic assembly equipment for which a program is to be generated. The CAM programs can also generate programs and documents to test the electronic printed circuit card. Additional information about each component such as resistance, capacitance, etc. is required to generate the tester program and documents. Some of this information is not provided by the component manufacturer and is derived from observations of the component tested in a printed circuit card. The CAM programs have data structures, called component catalogs, which may be used to store the component information. These data structures use the component part number to reference the information.
The part number system is the core of the product description for a company that designs and develops products since it provides the identification structure so that each component, product, etc. has a unique identifier. Each company has a self-consistent part number system. That is, each distinct component or item has a distinct part number that can be used to identify it. Two different components do not have the same part number. However, the part number system of two different companies may not be consistent with each other. A part number for a component in one company may be meaningless or assigned to a different component in another company. The Bill of Material provides an important part of the recipe to produce the product: the list of components and quantities of each component; the list is described in terms of part numbers. Suppliers provide some of the components. The Approved Manufacturer List, AML, provides the cross reference of a company""s part numbers to a supplier""s part number. The CAD describes the physical relationship of all of the components, usually as a set of drawings with each component labeled with its corresponding part number.
Many of the components are purchased from suppliers and the suppliers provide most, if not all, of the information required to place the component on the printed circuit substrate. The suppliers also provide much of the information for testing the component once assembled in the printed circuit card. The CAD file identifies that a component identified by its part number is to be placed at a specific location on the printed circuit substrate. The part number is used to identify the component in the BoM file. The part number is also used to identify the supplier and supplier part number in the AML so that the component parameters may be obtained from the supplier. The specific component parameters may depend on the characteristics of the assembly process. For example, a cookie baking process uses sugar. Sugar can be delivered in a variety of bag sizes, where a bag is a carrier for sugar, the equipment that uses in the process may require that a specific bag size be used and purchased from the supplier. The component carrier, carrier capacity, etc. must match the equipment and assembly process requirements. These steps are usually manual and performed by a component engineer. Once the component information is obtained, it is stored in a component catalog so that it may be reused when the component is used for another printed circuit card that uses that part with that part number. The relationship between the part number and the component information can be illustrated in a relational data base form in Table 1 where the part number is associated with the component information.
In the example in Table 1, the component with Part Number xe2x80x9c1234-5678xe2x80x9d is a capacitor that has a body Shape called xe2x80x9cJ1234xe2x80x9d and delivered in a Carrier called xe2x80x9cTR2400xe2x80x9d with 180 Rotation. The component with Part Number xe2x80x9c1234-5679xe2x80x9d is a microprocessor with body Shape called xe2x80x9cBGA200xe2x80x9d and delivered in a tray with 0 Rotation. The shape, carrier, and rotation are among the many parameters that the CAM program uses to generate the assembly and test equipment programs. The CAM programs require significantly more component information than that illustrated in Table 1. The CAM program also requires information that specifies the assembly and test equipment. The component catalog provides a onexe2x80x94one mapping of the part number to the component information. The part numbers must belong to one part number system to avoid duplicate part numbersxe2x80x94one part number assigned to two different components. If the product that contained part number xe2x80x9c1234-5678xe2x80x9d were to be assembled using another assembly process where a different assembly equipment required a different carrier, then the entry for part number xe2x80x9c1234-5678xe2x80x9d must be modified to reflect the new carrier information and the CAM program run again the generate the new programs and documents. If part number xe2x80x9c1234-5678xe2x80x9d is assembled on two assembly processes with two different carrier requirements, then xe2x80x9c1234-5678xe2x80x9d must have two different entries. Since this causes major database problems, usually each assembly process maintains a separate component catalog to avoid the database problem. In practice, each assembly process has its independent component catalog.
The process to generate the assembly and test machine programs and assembly documents is illustrated in FIG. 1 where the Design Group creates the CAD, BoM, and AML that describe the product. The Manufacturing Group determines the characteristics of the assembly process and selects the specific parts to order from the suppliers to accommodate the assembly process and equipment. The AML and the assembly process characteristics are used to select the supplier part number and obtain the component information. The component information is placed in the component catalog so that the information may be referenced using the part number assigned the component in the CAD, BoM, and AML files. The CAM program uses the CAD and BoM files to generate the programs for automated machines and assembly documents. These are used to adapt the assembly process to assemble the product described in the CAD file from the components specified in the BoM file. The process for adapting the assembly process has critical limitations: 1) a single part number system and 2) the specific characteristics of a specific assembly process. The CAM programs are designed to accommodate a wide variety of assembly and test equipment and do not require a specific part numbering system. However, the relationship between the CAD, BoM, AML, and the component catalog embed a specific part number system and the characteristics of a specific assembly process. These limitations limit wide use of these CAM programs and the benefits they provide. These limitations become more apparent when the product is outsourced and manufactured by a third party, the contract manufacturer or the provider of electronic manufacturing services.
Electronic Manufacturing Services
Many electronic OEM companies no longer manufacture the products they develop. Many new electronic OEM companies have never manufactured their products. These OEM use companies, called EMS, that provide Electronic Manufacturing Services which provide manufacturing facilities and component supply chain services. The EMS manufactures for many OEM companies and may provide manufacturing facilities at sites worldwide. The OEM provides the documents that describe the product to the EMS to build the prototype, the early manufacturing units, then volume build in manufacturing sites in several geographies. The EMS has multiple sites that have focused responsibilities: sites for rapid prototype production, sites for medium volume production, and sites for high volume production. The sites are in different geographies: North America, South America, Asia, Europe, etc. These business requirements limit the effectiveness of the CAM programs that adapt an assembly process using the CAD, BoM, and AML. An EMS site will support multiple OEM customers each with their own part numbers in their CAD, BoM, and AML files. An EMS site may have component information for the same component but since they are referenced using the part numbers of different OEM companies, the component appears as multiple components. An EMS with multiple sites may have component information for the same component from the same supplier with different part numbers on behalf of an OEM because of the different supplier part numbers in the AML to accommodate site equipment differences. The root cause of this problem is the lack of cross correlation between part numbers in the various part number systems. The EMS creates some of the part number issues. Each EMS site maps an OEM part number to an EMS site part number. Each site may have a different mapping mechanism so an OEM item may have a very different part number at each EMS site. Each EMS site must map the OEM part numbers in BoM and AML to the EMS site part number so that the BoM and AML are adapted to the EMS site. In addition, the AML is further adapted to match the EMS site equipment requirements. Each site has automated equipment that is suited for the type of business they support: prototype, medium volume, or high volume. The equipment may be from different manufacturers and each may have different carrier requirements. The items are fed into the automated equipment using carriers that are part of the product delivered by the supplier. The carrier type must match the requirement of the assembly equipment. An item delivered on carrier type A has a different supplier part number from the same item delivered on carrier type B. In the sugar example, the 50 pound bag has a different part number from the 100 pound bag. Both contain sugar but each bag size is a different carrier and has a different supplier part number. An electronic component may have a variety of tape and reel carriers, a variety of tray carriers, etc. and each has a different supplier part number. Because of the one to one relationship between the part number and the component information, creating and maintaining the information in the component catalog is difficult and error prone. When a product is moved to an assembly process that requires a different carrier, the component information must be changed. If the product is assembled on two assembly processes where each process requires a different carrier, then another part number must be created to accommodate the two different sets of component information. When an OEM uses a new part number, it may be difficult to determine if the same component is already described under the part number of another OEM. The result is a large proliferation of component information entries with many duplicated fields. As an example to estimate the size of the catalog, suppose that each OEM has 10,000 part numbers, with products assembled on 10 different assembly processes that have different carrier requirements, then each OEM would require 100,000 entries in the component catalog. This calculation assumes that each component has a process dependent difference for each component. This is generally not true. However, because the catalog structure is not designed to accommodate components with two (or more) assembly process differences, in practice, each assembly process component catalog would maintain a complete set of component information for the assembled product with the component information adapted to support the assembly process. If the EMS has 200 OEM customers, then the complete component catalog would have 20,000,000 entries. But because of the OEM part number and component carrier issues, the EMS does not see 20 million entries in one database but rather has 2,000 databases with 10,000 entries each. Each database is created and maintained by 2,000 manufacturing engineering teams. However, since these are different databases, transferring a product from an assembly process supported by one component catalog database to another assembly process supported by another component catalog database is difficult. The variety of part number systems and cross-referencing has been recognized as an issue. Manual processes for establishing and maintaining cross-reference tables have been difficult and error prone. The root of this problem is the need to have assembly process component information as part of the component catalog.
The EMS would gain significant benefit from CAM programs that could generate the assembly and test equipment programs and the assembly documents since the EMS assembly processes must support a variety of products. Bringing a new product into production faster would be a competitive advantage. More importantly, the ability to assemble a new product quickly, even in small quantities, is a significant competitive capability for building prototype units for the OEM. The ability to transfer a product from an assembly process optimized for prototypes, to an assembly process optimized for low volume production and then to later to transfer the product to medium or high volume production assembly processes in different global locations would be another significant competitive advantage.
The CAM programs from FabMaster and Unicam have been in the market for almost ten years. These programs support all of the assembly and test equipment used by the EMS and OEM companies. The equipment programs the CAM programs generate can be optimized to perform better than those created by engineers. But the uses of these programs have been limited and their potential capabilities have not been achieved. Part of the problem is the need to establish and maintain the cross-reference between the OEM part number, the EMS part number, the EMS site part number, and the supplier part number. The referenced patent application provides a solution to the part number problem. Another facet of the problem is the component catalog. The component catalog embeds the assembly process characteristics into the component information. The component catalog provided by the CAM programs assumes that the product has a single part number structure and that the product will be assembled on a single assembly process line. For an EMS and larger OEM companies, both of these assumptions are not true and limit the use of the CAM programs. Manual processes with some systems assistance have been applied to mitigate the effects of the assumptions. However, these manual processes are error prone and add delay to the fast moving changes demanded by commerce. Extending the current manual processes with automation will not work because the manual processes only focus on one or two symptoms of the issues and do not account for the interrelationship between the part number system and the assembly process characteristics. A new consolidated methodology is required.